Richard Tikey builds coke-oven doors for U.S. Steel. He’s a union guy, through and through: He’s been a union member for 26 years, and is now the vice president of his local, the United Steelworkers 1557 in Clairton, Pennsylvania. He has spent much of his adult life voting for Democrats.

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden lobbied hard for votes like Tikey’s. The Biden administration increased tariffs on foreign steel and spent hundreds of billions on heavy infrastructure. It supported union drives, stocked the National Labor Relations Board with worker-friendly lawyers, banned noncompete clauses, expanded eligibility for overtime, cracked down on union busting, and extended protections for civil servants. Biden was the first president in history to walk a picket line.

In contrast, Donald Trump has supported “right to work” laws, attempted to gut federal worker protections, and named union busters to lead the Department of Labor and the NLRB. He has also supported firing workers on strike, stiffed contractors for his campaigns and businesses, described American wages as “too high,” and bragged that he denied his own workers overtime pay.

Even so, weeks before the election, Tikey appeared in a lime-green hard hat and a Steelworkers for Trump T-shirt, giving a thumbs-up for cameras alongside the once and future president. “Why would we support Democrats?” Tikey told me this month. “Every time we have a Republican in office, things are better.”

Millions of other union members feel the same way. Exit polls indicate that nearly half of union households voted Republican in 2024, up from 43 percent in 2016 and 37 percent in 2000. Other polling shows that Trump commanded a 26-point lead among white voters without a college degree in union homes, up nine points since 2020. Conversely, Democratic support dropped 35 percentage points among Latino voters in union households, and also waned among Black union voters.

These trends are part of a long, slow tectonic electoral realignment. This century, the country has become less polarized in income terms, with Democrats gaining among coastal elites and Republicans among the working class. In the past decade, it has also become less racially polarized, with Black, Asian, and Latino voters shifting red. And education has become a much stronger predictor of a person’s partisanship. Democrats now dominate among the college-educated, and Republicans dominate among white people without a degree.

The Republican coalition has become more diverse, while the Democrats have seen their working-class base—the working-class base that delivered them election after election in the 20th century—walk away. What would it take to get voters like Tikey to come back?

First, Democrats need to understand how they lost them. The commonly told story is an economic one, which I have heard from union leaders, the Bernie left, and blue-collar voters who have started voting Republican. The Democrats have more liberal economic policies than the GOP: They support higher taxes on the wealthy and more progressive spending. But this is not the same thing as being pro-worker. And the party has shed voters as it has become more corporatist, pro-globalization, and cosmopolitan.

A Democratic president, Bill Clinton, signed NAFTA, which cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the heartland and suppressed wages. A Democratic president, Barack Obama, failed to pass “card check,” which would have made forming unions radically easier. He also negotiated the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which unions argued would send American jobs overseas. More broadly, Democrats failed to prevent the collapse of the unionized workforce, two decades of stagnation in middle-income wages, and the hollowing-out of the Rust Belt. Their answer was to “compensate the losers,” rather than avoid policies that generated losers to begin with. This cost them votes, as well as credibility among many working-class voters.

“Beginning with Jimmy Carter, there was an increasing effort to see unions and labor as a special interest, rather than a foundational part of the party,” Michael Podhorzer, the longtime political director of the AFL-CIO, told me. “There hasn’t been a political party in this country with working people at the table for decades. This is the bed the Democrats made for themselves, and it obviously has not paid off in the way they anticipated.”

At the same time, particularly in the past decade, Republicans have become more economically populist. The mainstream of the party now promotes restricting trade and running enormous deficits, even during economic expansions. They may threaten to make huge cuts to popular social programs, but rarely actually do so. The Affordable Care Act lives on; Medicare and Social Security remain untouched. Trump signed a stimulus bill twice as large as Obama’s.

Neither party delivered what it promised, economy-wise. It cost the Democrats and helped the GOP.

Political scientists and pollsters layer a cultural story onto this economic story. Since the 1970s, academics have noted that as societies have become wealthier, their voters have tended to care less about bread-and-butter financial issues and life-and-death defense ones. They begin voting on topics such as the environment, immigration, gender equity, and civil rights. (Academics call this “postmaterialism.”) People can “choose parties on the basis of their overall social and cultural views,” Matthew Grossmann, a political scientist at Michigan State University, told me.

Voters on both the right and the left have become postmaterial. The college-educated have aligned with the Democrats, attracted by the party’s views on climate change and racial equality. Non-college-educated voters have shifted toward the Republicans on the basis of immigration, abortion, and race. Patrick Ruffini, a Republican pollster and strategist, told me that Trump’s coalition might have been slightly lower-income than Harris’s during this election. If so, it would likely be the first time the Republican coalition was less wealthy than the Democratic coalition in decades. “You have the party of the working class versus the professional class,” he said, but it’s “cultural issues that are driving these changes.”

The greater emphasis on cultural issues has posed problems for both parties in their appeals to the American center, even as it has attracted votes too. In 2022, voters turned away from the GOP after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. (Some pollsters expected the same in 2024, but other issues predominated.) In the past three elections, the left’s position on immigration has alienated it from Latino voters it was desperately trying to hang on to. As my colleague Rogé Karma writes, these voters didn’t care about immigration as much as they cared about kitchen-table economics, and many had less liberal opinions about the border than professional Democrats.

The Democrats’ positions have proved the more alienating ones for the small-c conservative American public—something the party has been slow to acknowledge. “The Democratic Party is incredibly well educated and has incredibly liberal views on social issues, relative to the population as a whole,” Grossmann noted. “It is just not very easy to change that.”

For all that cultural issues help explain how Democrats lost the working class over the past two decades, the economy nevertheless seems to have been the decisive factor in Trump’s 2024 victory.

In polls, voters consistently named high prices as their top concern. They consistently said they trusted Trump to do better on the issue of inflation. Democrats pointed to the good headline numbers in terms of GDP growth, inequality, jobs, and wages, as well as the inflation-rate decline since 2022. Voters felt like the Democrats were ignoring or gaslighting them. Harris did not criticize the Biden administration for its role in stoking inflation. This cost her votes and perhaps the election, a pattern that has played out for incumbent parties around the world.

The Biden administration also fumbled in making the case for its policies to middle-income voters. Biden and Harris passed a tremendous amount of legislation but struggled to distill the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending and thousands of finicky provisions into tangible policy deliverables that the public could grasp. “While voters across party lines strongly supported Biden’s populist economic policies, many were not aware that his administration had enacted them,” an election postmortem by the left-of-center polling group Data for Progress found.

When I talked with voters during the campaign, I would often ask them what they thought Harris and Trump would do once in office. People tended to give specific answers for Trump, whether they themselves were a Democrat or a Republican. He’d enact tariffs, close the border, fire civil servants, and deport undocumented criminals. Even motivated Democrats, I found, struggled to name Harris’s top priorities. Someone might respond with 10 answers or sometimes none.

The candidates the Democrats ran and the strategies their campaigns deployed were less-than-ideal too. Biden’s age and Harris’s lack of authentic connection with voters, something that’s hard to measure but not hard to see, were obstacles to victory. The Democrats’ character-based vilification of Trump failed to connect for many voters who liked the guy and supported his policies. “People underestimated the appeal of Trump’s message to nonwhite working-class audiences,” Ruffini told me. “They didn’t think it could cross over.”

History suggests that things will get easier for Democrats, in some ways. If past trends hold, the party will pick up five or more points in the midterms without doing anything. The Republicans will start passing policies and instantly become less popular in the eyes of voters, left and right. And in the next presidential campaign, the Democrats will benefit from being able to run unencumbered by incumbency, against Trumpism, if not Trump himself.

Still, pollsters and political scientists told me, the party needs to change. The “Brahmin left”—meaning the educated elite that now makes up the Democratic Party’s base—is not a big enough bloc to defeat Republicans going forward. Democrats have to get back at least some members of the middle class, the working poor, and the unions.

In terms of kitchen-table policies, well, the Democrats need to have some. Just a few. Big ones. Popular ones that are easy to understand. A bill that caps the price of all prescription drugs at $25 a month, say, rather than a 19-point policy white paper.

The content of such proposals matters too. The Brahmin left tends to be more supportive of redistribution than the working class, which tends to prefer something that economists call “predistribution”: high minimum wages rather than welfare payments, pro-union policies rather than refundable tax credits, antitrust measures rather than food stamps. Moderate families also give higher marks to social spending that feels like infrastructure: universal pre-K, guaranteed jobs programs, and public internet.

The cultural drift of the party will be harder to change, political analysts told me. Tacking to the center would mean repudiating activists on immigration, the environment, women’s and LGBTQ rights, and abortion—the same activists who have marched in the streets, raised money, and knocked on doors for Democrats, and have become its most loyal voters. It would mean ignoring many of Washington’s most powerful nonprofits and interest groups. “I’m a progressive,” Jared Abbott, the director of the Center for Working-Class Politics, told me. “I’m not even sure it would work, because the reputation of the party is so set in.”

Indeed, Harris brought up that she was a gun owner and ran on her record as a prosecutor. She did not emphasize trans-rights issues, nor did she use the term Latinx in speeches. What did her relative centrism get her?

Still, pollsters noted that some politicians have had success with their cultural appeals to more conservative voters: John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, Ruben Gallego in Arizona, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez in Washington. It might not take much more than loudly rejecting some far-left positions, Ruffini told me. “You have to have someone come out and say: ‘Here’s what I’m for and I’m against. And I don’t like some of this cultural stuff.’ Create a clear moment of contrast and differentiation.”

I asked Tikey which issues drew him to the Republicans. He made more money under Republicans, he told me (though union data show that workers got large profit-sharing payments under Biden). He thought Trump would do better on inflation, and he appreciated the GOP’s stance on abortion, gender, and guns. Plus, he said, “I don’t understand why unions endorse Democrats when they want to shut down” plants like the one he works in. He has a point. Democrats are not vowing to save coal plants, for instance. They’re promising to compensate the losers.

In the future, could a more centrist Democrat, in cultural and economic terms, win Tikey over? “The Democratic Party has changed,” he told me. It just isn’t the party that he and many of his neighbors supported back in the 1990s. “I don’t think so,” he said.

Sia Liilii comes from a big family in Hawaii, the ninth of 11 children. Without her volleyball scholarship at the University of Nevada at Reno, she told me recently, she would never have been able to go to college. So when she got wind this past summer that one of Nevada’s opponents in the Mountain West Conference, San Jose State University, was fielding a transgender player, she rebelled. “It’s not right that this person is taking not only a starting spot but a roster spot, from a female who has, just like us, played volleyball her whole life and dreamt of playing at the collegiate level,” Liilii said.

The story of transgender women competing in female sports is frequently told as one of inclusion—creating opportunities for people to compete as their authentic selves. But for athletes such as Liilii, these rules were a matter of exclusion. Every spot taken by someone with a male athletic advantage is an opportunity closed to a female rival.

Other players in the conference, it turned out, had concerns similar to Liilii’s. In particular, some worried whether a ball spiked over the net by a stronger and more powerful player could injure them. Those concerns would ultimately lead Nevada and other teams to forfeit games to San Jose State, in the largest-scale protest yet by female athletes against the presence of a trans competitor.

More than 200,000 women compete in college sports in the United States, according to the National Collegiate Athletic Association, and more than 3.4 million girls take part in high-school sports, according to the ​​National Federation of State High School Associations. Questions of fair competition tend to resonate intensely with both athletes and their supporters. Sports organizations set rules to minimize unwarranted advantages—witness the restrictions on high-tech sharkskin-inspired swimsuits and running shoes with carbon-fiber plates. But while Nike estimates that its VaporFly sneakers give a 4 percent boost to wearers, the performance gap between men and women is estimated to vary from 10 to 50 percent, depending on the sport. Yet progressives have downplayed that sex difference—which is obvious to many casual observers—because it challenges the idea that transgender women should be treated as women in all circumstances.

[Jonathan Chait: Moderation is not the same thing as surrender]

On Joe Biden’s first day in office as president, he issued an executive order opposing discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Its language did not explicitly address college athletics but declared that all “children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports.” After the 2022 midterms, LGBTQ organizations assured Democrats that Republican attack ads about trans athletes in female sports were ineffective—the issue was too far down voters’ list of priorities, they argued.

Yet by this fall, Donald Trump’s campaign was pummeling the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, with a spot that showed, among other images, a 2012 picture of Gabrielle Ludwig, a 50-something basketball player who had returned to college after transitioning. At 6 feet 6 inches tall, Ludwig towered over her teammates. Harris’s campaign reportedly tested several rebuttals, and found that none of them worked. So how did Democrats move from proudly championing trans inclusion in Biden’s early days as president to finding the topic an unanswerable liability three years later? Why did the left refuse to acknowledge the trade-off between inclusion of some athletes and fairness to others? Why were concerns like Sia Liilii’s so easily ignored?

Many progressives have viewed trans rights as an uncomplicated sequel to the successful campaigns for voting rights for Black Americans and marriage equality for same-sex couples. But the volleyball players were pointing to an issue that affected two traditionally marginalized groups: gender-nonconforming people and women athletes. And the left, which had become attached to a simple, hierarchical ranking of oppression, could find no way to arbitrate between the two groups—or even acknowledge that any conflict existed.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, American women fought for the right to play sports at all. They were excluded by arbitrary rules, inadequate facilities and funding, and the belief that competition was unhealthy and unfeminine. The 1972 passage of the law known as Title IX, which prohibited discrimination “on the basis of sex” in educational settings, began to improve the situation for college athletes. But in recent years, lawyers have argued over what the law means—does sex cover only biological sex, or gender identity and sexual orientation? Almost everyone agrees that, in most sports, men and women should compete in different categories. The argument is over whether the lines should be drawn by athletes’ genes or their experience of gender.

Many articles in the popular press have portrayed the growing visibility of trans athletes as a sign of social progress. In 2021, the New Zealand weight lifter Laurel Hubbard was heralded as the first openly trans athlete to compete in the Olympics. In a lengthy 2022 profile, the University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas told Sports Illustrated, “I just want to show trans kids and younger trans athletes that they’re not alone. They don’t have to choose between who they are and the sport they love.” Some high-profile female athletes have championed this spirit of inclusion. The former U.S. women’s soccer captain Megan Rapinoe has described restrictions on trans players as “trying to legislate away people’s full humanity.”

Throughout the Biden administration, activist groups waved away tough questions, claiming that there was no evidence of “trans athletes” having advantages. But such generic phrasing is deceptive. No one is arguing that trans men have an advantage over biological males; when trans men compete in the male category, they tend to struggle. The actual question is whether natal males have an advantage over natal females. Liilii told me that when she raised the issue with her coaches at Nevada when the players were deciding whether to play against San Jose State, one of the college staff told her to educate herself on the topic, “really implying that we weren’t smart enough to know what is happening.”

For all the plaudits that Lia Thomas received from some quarters, she also came to symbolize others’ concerns. Thomas was a higher-ranked swimmer in the female category than she had been in the male one a few seasons earlier. She had ranked 65th among men in the 500-yard freestyle, for example; she won an NCAA championship in the women’s event. Greater awareness of Thomas and other trans athletes in women’s sports did not translate into greater approval. If anything, the opposite occurred: In 2021, 55 percent of Democrats supported transgender athletes competing in the team of their chosen gender, according to Gallup. Two years later, however, that number had fallen to 47 percent. Overall, nearly seven out of 10 Americans now think athletes should compete in the category of their birth sex.

[Read: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

By 2023, the Biden White House seemed to be backing away from the sweeping language in its earlier executive order. The administration proposed to give schools and universities more leeway to limit trans athletes’ participation while prohibiting states from enacting blanket bans. The situation remained in flux when the college volleyball season began this year. Under USA Volleyball rules, trans athletes who take “the necessary steps to transition to their adopted gender,” including lowering their testosterone levels, are allowed to compete in the women’s category.

The extent to which hormone suppression negates male athletic advantage is a matter of scientific debate. But when Liilii saw videos of the disputed player during the preseason, she remembers thinking, “The way this person is jumping and hitting the ball—I’ve never seen a woman do that.” (The player has not publicly confirmed her transgender status, so I’m choosing not to name her. She did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In legal filings, San Jose State has neither disputed that it was fielding a transgender player nor identified the athlete in question. “Our student athletes are in full compliance with NCAA rules and regulations,” a university spokesperson told me by email.)

In September, the San Jose State co-captain Brooke Slusser and the associate coach Melissa Batie-Smoose went public with their concerns about their own team’s trans player. “Safety is being taken away from women,” Batie-Smoose later told Fox News. “Fair play is taken away from women.” Both women told Quillette that they believed players and coaches were being pressured not to make a fuss. The next month, Liilii told me, she and her Nevada teammates voted, 16–1, to boycott their next match against San Jose State. The Nevada players were not alone: Teams from Boise State, the University of Wyoming, Southern Utah, and Utah State also forfeited games rather than face the trans player.

San Jose State kept competing despite all that—and despite a lawsuit aimed at barring the school from the Mountain West Conference postseason tournament in Las Vegas in November. (The lawsuit failed, and the team finished second in the finals.) The season ended in acrimony. “I will not sugarcoat our reality for the last two months,” San Jose State’s head coach, Todd Kress, said in a statement after the tournament. “Each forfeiture announcement unleashed appalling, hateful messages individuals chose to send directly to our student-athletes, our coaching staff, and many associated with our program.” Afterward, seven of the team’s athletes requested to enter the transfer portal. The disputed player, who is a senior, will not compete again.

By the time of the tournament, San Jose State’s roster had become a national political issue. Sia Liilii told me that after her team put out its statement refusing to play the California school, one of their next matches was attended by Tulsi Gabbard, the former Democratic member of Congress whom Trump has nominated to be director of national intelligence; Sam Brown, the Republican candidate for Senate in Nevada; and Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. “That was really reassuring,” Liilii said, “just seeing that there’s a lot of support.” Clearly, many on the right felt that a revolt in women’s volleyball had the potential to connect with voters. Meanwhile, on the left, people who questioned the activist line—including the tennis legend Martina Navratilova, a longtime progressive—were being excoriated for their supposed bigotry.

“People like to say that it’s a complicated issue, and I don’t actually think it is … It all boils down to: Do you actually think that trans women and intersex women are real women—and are really female or not?” the transgender cyclist Veronica Ivy told The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah in 2022. “It’s an extreme indignity to say, ‘I believe you’re a woman, except for sport.’” She added that the enforcement of traditional categories was about “protecting the fragile, weak cis white woman from the rest of us.” Noah’s studio audience in New York heartily applauded Ivy’s words. Sports was only one part of a seamless whole: If you believed, as good liberals did, that trans women were women, no carve-outs were justifiable.

In red America, however, a different narrative was developing. The same year that Ivy was soaking up the Daily Show applause, Riley Gaines, a University of Kentucky swimmer who had competed against Lia Thomas, went public with her objection to trans inclusion in her league. She recalls feeling slighted after a race in which she tied with Thomas for fifth place but the Penn swimmer got to hold the relevant trophy. “It took that personal experience,” Gaines told me. “I hate that it took that. I wish I was more bold.” In March 2024, her profile exploded when she was interviewed by Joe Rogan. Here was an everyday Christian girl talking to a sports-mad superstar podcaster about how the left was trying to deny that men are stronger than women. If thousands of YouTube comments are any indication, Rogan’s audience loved it.

Gaines has joined a lawsuit against the NCAA, calling for a nationwide ban on transgender women in female categories. The ACLU and other advocacy groups on the left have intervened to oppose Gaines’s suit, suggesting that conservative slogans about “protecting women’s sports” are a cover for racism, transphobia, and misogyny. The National Women’s Law Center believes that “the work of gender justice is at odds with overbroad generalizations about sex-related traits or abilities” and suggests that the “over-policing” of athletes’ bodies particularly harms minority women.

By contrast, conservatives have welcomed female athletes who feel abandoned by American feminist and civil-rights groups. Today, Gaines, Liilii, and other female athletes who have spoken out on this issue have signed up to be ambassadors for the Independent Women’s Forum, a nonprofit that previously criticized what it saw as overzealous enforcement of Title IX. In 2012, the group’s then executive director wrote that “what is very clear is that legislation in the name of ‘gender equality’ does not actually make men and women the same.” However, the group now fights to “take back Title IX” by separating participation in sports on the basis of biological sex.

People “love to receive information through stories,” May Mailman, the IWF’s director and a former White House adviser to Donald Trump, told me. “The left knows this—George Floyd is one story that sparked immense societal unrest.” During the presidential campaign, the IWF sent its ambassadors on a cross-country bus tour that started in Scranton, Pennsylvania, under the slogan “Our bodies, our sports.” The group’s ambassadors have also testified before Congress and in states considering restrictions on transgender women participating in female sports. The IWF’s ideological opponents may dismiss these athletes as political partisans. But even if some are, so what? Conservatives have a right to speak up, and the institutional left certainly didn’t listen to the players’ concerns. Progressives can’t expect to triumph by silencing dissenters through administrative pressure.

[Helen Lewis: The push for puberty blockers got ahead of the research]

One of the most influential IWF ambassadors is Payton McNabb, who says she received a brain injury in 2022, at the age of 17, when playing volleyball against a transgender opponent. A widely circulated video of the incident shows the spike that hit her, but not what happened subsequently. She told me that she was briefly unconscious. “The neurologist told me that I had a brain bleed, partial paralysis on my right side, and a concussion,” she added. (She declined to provide her medical records for me to verify her account.) Her story is the kind that is invisible to a certain type of American media consumer but achieves the status of lore with another. She has been interviewed by Fox News, Megyn Kelly and the New York Post, and on the podcast of Allie Beth Stuckey, a rising star on the religious right who was described in The Atlantic as the “new Phyllis Schlafly.”

In August 2023, McNabb testified in front of the North Carolina legislature after Governor Roy Cooper, a Democrat, vetoed a law that banned athletes “of the male sex” from competing on women’s teams. All of the state’s Republicans, along with two Democrats, later voted to override the veto. During the hearings, it emerged that in the four years that the North Carolina High School Athletic Association had permitted transgender players to choose their teams, only two natal male students had successfully applied to play as girls. That can be read two ways. One is this: Why were Republicans making such a big deal out of an issue that affects so few students? The other is this: Why did Democrats, a few years ago, make such a big deal out of an issue that affected so few students?

After the 2024 election, a handful of Democrats broke ranks. “I have two little girls,” Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts told The New York Times. “I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” His campaign manager subsequently resigned, protesters gathered outside one of his offices, and he was rebuked by the state’s Democratic governor. But many of Moulton’s fellow Democrats were notably silent. “Asked for comment on Mr. Moulton’s remarks, each of the 10 other members of the state’s congressional delegation, all Democrats, declined to comment or did not immediately respond,” the Times reported. Further evidence that a taboo had been broken came on the Friday before Christmas. The White House abandoned its proposed rule change forbidding blanket bans on trans athletes after 150,000 public responses, acknowledging that the incoming Trump administration will set its own rules.

Meanwhile, many international sports organizations have opted to define their women’s division in biological terms. This past summer, Lia Thomas lost her legal case against World Aquatics, which had barred her from the female competition. A leading contender to be the next head of the International Olympic Committee, Britain’s Sebastian Coe, has said that “the protection of the female category, for me, is absolutely non-negotiable.” Those who favor defining women’s sports according to biology feel confident that their side will prevail. “I have nieces, and I have little sisters,” Sia Liilii told me. She said she was happy “knowing that I did the right thing, and knowing that when they are in my position, they won’t have to deal with this.”

[Read: I detransitioned. But not because I wasn’t trans.]

In my view, the way forward lies in an empathetic compromise, one that broadly respects transgender Americans’ sense of their own identity—for example, in the use of chosen names and pronouns—while acknowledging that in some areas, biology really matters. Many sports organizations have established a protected female category, reserved for those who have not experienced the advantages conferred by male puberty, alongside an open one available to men, trans women, trans men taking testosterone supplements, and nonbinary athletes of either sex. Unlike Veronica Ivy, many voters who support laws protecting trans people from housing and employment discrimination don’t see trans rights as an all-or-nothing deal; in fact, a few limited carve-outs on the basis of biological sex might increase acceptance of gender-nonconforming people overall.

Not everything has to be an entrenched battle of red versus blue: As more and more Democrats realize that they shouldn’t have built their defense of trans people on the sand of sex denialism, Republicans should have the grace to take the win on sports and disown the inflammatory rhetoric of agitators such as Representative Nancy Mace, who responded to the election of the first trans member of Congress by deploying anti-trans slurs. As the second Trump administration begins, the lesson from the college-volleyball rebellion is that institutions cannot impose progressive values by fiat. Attempts at social change will not survive without the underlying work of persuasion.

Sia Liilii and other women athletes said no. Universities and sports organizations needed a better response.

Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was about much more than a backlash to left-identity politics. Inflation, among other matters, loomed larger. Still, Trump gained significant ground with Latino, Black, Asian, Arab, Gen Z, and big-city voters. And that, as much as Kamala Harris’s loss, has spurred Democrats to reconsider the role that identity politics plays in their coalition. “Identity politics needs to go the way of the dodo,” Elissa Slotkin, who just won a Senate race in Michigan, said in a meeting of fellow Democrats. “Identity politics did not work electorally, and it failed miserably strategically,” Rahm Emanuel told Politico. “Some Democrats are finally waking up,” the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote, “and realizing that woke is broke.”

This is a significant shift. At the height of the “Great Awokening,” as white liberals moved to the left of the typical Black voter on questions of race and racism, a faction of progressive intellectuals persuaded themselves that identity politics was the future of liberalism. They had noble intentions: They saw persistent inequalities in society, felt frustrated that change wasn’t happening faster, and so advocated for more and more radical measures to fix what they perceived as injustices. And they changed the Democratic Party. Harris was one of the politicians who appeared to embrace their narrative, in ways that would haunt her later run for the presidency.

[Jon Favreau: The conversation Democrats need to have]

Most Americans agree with progressives that racism and sexism are still problems. But supporters of identity politics were mistaken in assuming that the same majority would sign on to pursuing equity instead of equality. So there is promise in a reckoning: It is necessary to get the Democratic Party back in sync with everyday voters. And America will benefit if either of its major parties rejects politics that treat race, sex, and other identities as the most important things about a person.

But there is peril too: Identity politics is vague and rarely defined. When pressed to say what they’re objecting to, most critics of identity politics can cite examples. But mocking specific excesses––unpopular neologisms such as Latinx, racial litmus tests, the push to shift from LGBTQ to the comically untenable LGBTQIA2S+––doesn’t clarify how to stop them without giving up on worthy political efforts to help identity groups.

“There’s a real risk of overcorrecting,” the Illinois State Representative Kam Buckner warned in a recent opinion article. “Without a thorough critique of what went wrong and a thoughtful path forward, we could end up discarding an essential tool for connection and understanding.” Democrats need a guiding principle. The most promising is equal treatment. Majorities of every racial group value it, likely because they see how much good the civil-rights movement did by rooting itself in this ideal, and how abandoning the ideal could hurt everyone. Violating equal treatment should be out of bounds.

The progressive identitarian attack on equal treatment is explicit and radical in its implications. In a 2020 Vox essay that championed identity politics, Zack Beauchamp favorably quoted the late philosopher Iris Marion Young. She argued that “the specificity of each group requires a specific set of rights for each, and for some a more comprehensive system than for others.” In Beauchamp’s retelling, identity politics was both the savior and the future of American liberalism, and “true equality demands treating groups differently rather than the same.”

But “treating groups differently” is politically unsustainable––try telling a diverse group of Americans who gets the best treatment, who gets middling treatment, and who will be treated worst.

Most Americans prefer a universalist vision: True equality demands treating people the same regardless of their identity group. So no segregated diners, no firing an employee for being gay, no stop-and-frisks that racially profile Black pedestrians, and no college-admissions officers who malign Asian American applicants. When progressive identitarians make the case for “good” discrimination against members of groups that they deem privileged, they sever their coalition’s historic connection to equal treatment and civil-rights law. They also weaken vital, hard-won norms and invite bigoted excesses.

[Read: Is this how Democrats win back the working class?]

A useful reckoning would reaffirm equal treatment and its basic corollaries. For example: Stop maligning whole identity groups. And treat all group discrimination as both irrational and wrong.

During Donald Trump’s first run for president, ideologically diverse critics denounced him for saying that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” The backlash was fueled partly by Americans like me who believe that attacks on groups mislead, divide, and weaken the country.

But even as the populist right ramped up its corrosive rhetoric, the identitarian left was violating similar norms against multiple groups. During Trump’s first term, Harvard was caught assigning lower personality scores to Asian American applicants. Joe Biden declared in 2020 that Black Americans unsure about voting for him “ain’t Black.” In a secretly recorded 2022 meeting, Los Angeles City Council members denigrated Oaxacans and Black people while discussing how to shore up Latino political power at the expense of Black Angelenos. After the October 7 attacks, some Jewish college students and faith-based organizations were targets of anti-Israel activists simply because of their Jewishness. White women are an especially frequent target of left identitarians––these headlines all appeared in mainstream news outlets in the past five years: “How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror” (The New York Times); “White Women, Come Get Your People” (The New York Times); “I Refuse to Listen to White Women Cry” (The Washington Post); “How White Women Doomed Kamala Harris and the Democrats—Again” (The New Republic); “I Broke Up With Her Because She’s White” (The New York Times); “White Women’s Role in White Supremacy, Explained” (Vox).

Much as Republicans once paid a price when Rush Limbaugh made offensive statements about women, Democrats pay a price when prominent individuals and institutions associated with its coalition heap scorn on a large group of voters. And regardless of the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party, trafficking in sweeping negative stereotypes about any identity group is wrong and contagious.

Embracing “equal treatment for all” will also mean repudiating racially discriminatory practices. Some supporters of identity politics favor crossing the line into discrimination––arguing, for example, that scarce, life-saving vaccines should be given to members of “structurally and historically disadvantaged” groups first, “even if this means that overall life years gained may be lower.”

[Read: Moderation is not the same thing as surrender]

Other examples include: a big-city Democratic mayor announcing that she will not grant interviews to white journalists; a first-time-homebuyer program in Washington State excluding applicants on the basis of race; guidelines for access to COVID-19 treatments in New York that included race as a consideration; faculty search committees where the race of applicants is openly and unlawfully discussed as a factor in hiring; progressive activists organizing a day when they tell white people to absent themselves from a public university campus; a large medical institution penalizing a doctor of Filipina descent for “internalized whiteness” after she objected to racially segregated care; subjecting a professor at a state university in Pennsylvania to a racially hostile climate in training sessions.

This trend isn’t Jim Crow or even stop-and-frisk, but it is a concerning step backward. And politically speaking, “equality demands treating groups differently” is a losing message. In California, one of the most progressive states in the country, voters decided that college admissions should be race-blind in 1996. Progressives tried to bring back differential treatment in 2020, and California voters rejected racial preferences again by an even wider margin than before. In 2019, Pew Research Center asked if employers should consider an applicant’s race and ethnicity in hiring and promotions, or consider their qualifications exclusively, even if it results in less diversity. Seventy-four percent of respondents favored considering qualifications alone. Majorities of white, Black, Hispanic, and Democratic Party respondents all agreed on that conclusion.

To do good for the country––and to perform better in upcoming elections––Democrats don’t need to abandon identity politics entirely. Their coalition can celebrate Pride and Black History Month, object to Muslim bans, urge corporations to recruit from racially and ethnically diverse applicant pools, and more, so long as it also rejects the party’s least popular, most harmful identity-politics excesses. If Democrats renounce identitarian stereotyping and discrimination, their coalition will benefit, and America will too.

Should American states be allowed to ban puberty blockers for teenagers with gender dysphoria? That issue is currently being considered by the Supreme Court, which recently heard oral arguments about a Tennessee law restricting medical transition by minors. The Biden administration and the ACLU have sued to block the law. Before the justices, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar and the ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio found themselves trying to navigate two different sets of questions. One was about discrimination; the other was about scientific evidence.

The case that Prelogar and Strangio wanted to make is that state bans on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery for minors with gender dysphoria should be subject to enhanced scrutiny because they violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. If girls can take blockers to postpone female puberty, why can’t dysphoric natal boys take the drugs to avoid male puberty? If teenage biological males can be prescribed the male hormone testosterone, then why not biological females? “What the birth males can do that birth females cannot do is receive medical treatment to live and identify as boys,” Strangio argued. “And what birth females can do that birth males can’t do is receive medical treatment to live and identify as girls.”

But the Court kept running into a more awkward question: Are medical treatments for minors with gender dysphoria even scientifically justified? In the late 1990s, doctors in the Netherlands touted a new treatment for teenagers with severe gender dysphoria who found puberty distressing: chemically blocking their sex hormones and then giving them the hormones of the opposite sex. Gender-dysphoric males got puberty blockers and then estrogen; females got blockers and then testosterone. Patients were also offered mastectomies, phalloplasties, or other surgeries. The initial Dutch study of 70 patients showed positive results, and the “Dutch protocol” was soon adopted by clinics around the world.

[Read: Moderation is not the same thing as surrender]

But from the start, questions arose around how quickly adolescents should be able to transition. Where was the line between preventing rash decisions and inflicting cruelty through unnecessary delays? Since then, the picture has been further complicated by research that undermines activists’ biggest claims for the protocol: that it can alleviate mental distress and prevent suicides, and that puberty blockers act as a neutral “pause button” for children to have “time to think.”

The American medical consensus—formed by the majority of the country’s professional medical associations—still supports puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for adolescents who are unhappy with their birth sex. But unhelpfully for Prelogar and Strangio, the Supreme Court justices revealed themselves to be familiar with the very different situation in Europe, where medical authorities in France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Norway, and Finland have all begun to sour on medical gender interventions for minors. Doubts have even reached the Netherlands, where the Dutch protocol was developed. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative, said that if “England’s pulling back and Sweden’s pulling back, it strikes me as a pretty heavy yellow light, if not red light.”

In the U.K., for example, the ruling Labour Party has just indefinitely extended the ban on prescribing blockers for gender dysphoria outside of clinical trials—a ban imposed earlier this year by the previous Conservative government. That followed the publication of the Cass Review, led by a senior pediatrician, which included systematic reviews of the available research that “demonstrated the poor quality of the published studies.” Treatments that had originally been authorized for a small and tightly defined group were later prescribed on a far broader scale, the review found, without any real controls.

British politicians on both the left and right now accept that the evidence for puberty blockers is weak, their potential side effects are worrisome, and withdrawal of these treatments does not lead to increased suicides. Continuing to prescribe blockers would therefore pose “an unacceptable safety risk for children and young people,” Labour’s health minister, Wes Streeting, declared last Wednesday.

In the United States, though, the situation is much more polarized. The reason that the Tennessee case has reached the Supreme Court is that red states have stepped into the void between public opinion on puberty blockers (cautious, to say the least) and the official position of most major U.S. medical associations (this is necessary health care). Since 2021, more than 20 red states have tried to ban or restrict blockers, while blue states continue to permit their use—and also gender-related surgeries on minors, which have never been allowed in Britain. The medical associations seem very happy to decry skeptics as extremist culture warriors but less keen to engage with the scientific discussion happening in Europe. Why? Insularity, perhaps, or political polarization—or, in some cases, reputational or even financial investment in the status quo.

I can’t help seeing this divide as a reflection of a deeper chasm in American politics. By and large, Democrats have higher institutional trust than Republicans, and are more ready to follow the lead of the American Medical Association or the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization that sets the treatment guidelines for gender dysphoria. After attending the Supreme Court hearings, the New York Times columnist M. Gessen wrote that the red-state bans demonstrate how “defying medical consensus is becoming something of a national pastime.” But consensus is not the same as evidence. In this case, when liberals talk about “trusting the science,” what they actually mean is that they trust the American medical establishment. (Many individual doctors have expressed skepticism at the approach of their professional associations.)

The American left’s blanket defense of youth gender medicine has been boosted by the right’s wider disdain for gender nonconformity. In red states, puberty-blocker bans are often accompanied by unpleasant rhetoric and illiberal measures; as my colleague Adam Serwer has reported, in 2022 Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered investigations into parents of children receiving gender-related care. You can believe, as I do, that the evidence supporting medical gender interventions for teens is weak, but also that many parents are making good-faith attempts to help their distressed children, in many cases backed by medical professionals whose judgment they should be able to trust. The Tennessee law now under scrutiny claims that “this state has a legitimate, substantial, and compelling interest in encouraging minors to appreciate their sex, particularly as they undergo puberty.” In other circumstances, the right would argue that whether or not any of us “appreciate” our sex is none of the government’s business.

In blue states, however, free inquiry has been poisoned by the belief that any misgivings about this treatment—even those shared by reputable medical authorities in progressive European countries—must be driven by anti-trans sentiment. Although the medical associations make a big deal out of the need for proper diagnosis and “careful consideration by each patient and their family,” in practice some clinics operate on purely affirmative lines. Their doctors do not question adolescents’ gender identification or explore other potential causes for their distress; clinics have been known to prescribe blockers on a patient’s first visit. A recent lawsuit alleges that a prominent American gender-medicine specialist, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, referred one of her patients, Clementine Breen, for puberty blockers at age 12 without a psychological evaluation. Breen was then transferred to cross-sex hormones at 13 and had a double mastectomy at 14. (She has since detransitioned.) Olson-Kennedy has not yet responded to the suit, and her hospital told The Economist that it did not comment on pending legal cases.

[Read: The Democrats need an honest conversation on gender identity]

Olson-Kennedy, who has served as an expert witness against many state bans on blockers, also recently revealed that she has delayed publication of the results of a federally funded study she led into their effectiveness. She said she feared that its findings would be “weaponized” by the right. When researchers who support gender medicine for teens are applying a political filter to their data, Supreme Court justices and average Americans alike might reasonably doubt whether they’re getting the whole story.

In oral arguments, Strangio quietly let go of another favored argument for the affirmative model. He was asked about the common activist claim that puberty blockers reduce suicides. Having covered this subject for a decade, I can’t overstate how influential this suggestion has been to the promotion of medical intervention for minors. For years, skeptics have been told by gender clinicians and groups such as the ACLU that affirmative care for minors is lifesaving. Concerns over the loss of future sexual function and other side effects recede if the alternative is death. In clinical settings, cautious parents have faced the emotional bludgeon of being asked: Would you rather have a dead son than a living daughter?

This was always a disturbing trope. Mental-health charities recommend against glorifying suicide, or suggesting that it sends a message to an uncaring world, because of the risk of contagion. But recent evidence suggests that the “lifesaving” rhetoric is also overblown or false. After the U.K. officially suspended the prescription of puberty blockers, opponents suggested that it meant the government was responsible for killing children. In response, Streeting sensibly commissioned an independent review into suicide rates among patients at the Tavistock, England’s only gender clinic for children, after that facility stopped prescribing puberty blockers. This found that “the data do not support the claim that there has been a large rise in suicide in young gender dysphoria patients at the Tavistock”—in fact, there was no increase at all—and also that “the way that this issue has been discussed on social media has been insensitive, distressing and dangerous, and goes against guidance on safe reporting of suicide.”

In front of the Supreme Court, Prelogar stated that denying an adolescent the ability to transition medically could “increase the risk of suicide.” But when Strangio was asked whether such statements were too dogmatic—given how disputed that claim was—he immediately backed down. “On page 195 of the Cass Report, it says: There is no evidence that gender-affirmative treatments reduce suicide,” Justice Alito observed. “What I think that is referring to is there is no evidence in some—in the studies that this treatment reduces completed suicide,” Strangio replied. “And the reason for that is completed suicide, thankfully and admittedly, is rare.” Instead, he said, some studies showed a reduction in suicidality—thoughts of suicide. That might be true, but it is not what activists have been arguing for the past decade. That an advocate as accomplished as Strangio had to make this climbdown in front of the Supreme Court is a serious reproach to the tactics of LGBTQ groups over this issue. All of us should want to build a society where children in undoubted distress get the support that they need, in whatever form that takes. If activists luridly claim that their opponents have “blood on their hands,” they should be able to back up that assertion.

The Supreme Court is not expected to return its ruling in the Tennessee case until late spring or early summer, and most observers do not expect the 6–3 conservative majority to strike down the Tennessee ban. The mere appearance of the case at the highest court in the U.S. has left activists worried; a defeat might open the door to wider bans on hormone treatment for adults, they believe, or lead to greater disregard among federal judges for further claims of unconstitutional discrimination. “In their apparent eagerness to uphold this Tennessee law, the Court’s Republican majority appears likely not just to strike a blow against trans rights,” Ian Millihiser wrote in Vox. “They also appear poised to do considerable damage to the legal standard governing sex discrimination generally.”

I’m sympathetic to that argument. Still, that danger wouldn’t exist had the American medical establishment been willing to engage with international research, and had it found a way to rein in the most extreme affirmative clinicians. None of the European countries I mentioned above have banned hormone therapies or surgeries for transgender adults, recognizing that the Dutch protocol is a unique treatment with distinctive ethical challenges.

[Read: I detransitioned. But not because I wasn’t trans.]

I live in Britain. Having opposed the red-state bans on gender medicine for minors, I was surprised to find myself welcoming Streeting’s announcement of an indefinite pause. Then I realized the difference: Streeting is a democratically elected politician following the advice of an independent report, led by a senior pediatrician, backed by the gold standard of research. The new policy will be reviewed in three years and can be revised if new evidence emerges. Here in the U.K., each argument in this area can be about the narrow topic at hand, rather than being co-opted into a grander ideological battle. Here, you can support blocker bans but also hormone therapies for adults. You can support single-sex sports and prisons—as a limited carve-out from the broader acceptance of trans people’s sense of their own identities.

In the U.S., however, the “sides” are much more sharply drawn: Conservatives have pursued legislation on puberty blockers as part of a wider backlash against gender nonconformity—a view also evident in the insinuation that drag queens are ruining the military. Meanwhile, progressives refuse to cede any ground whatsoever, even on their most unpopular and poorly evidenced positions. Any concession is treated as merely a prelude to the wholesale triumph of their enemies.

The fact that the Tennessee case is being heard at all represents a profound political  failure; even the conservative justices wondered aloud how well placed judges are to settle questions around evolving medical research. Kicking all difficult questions to the Supreme Court might be the American way—but it’s not the best one.

Donald Trump is most likely not trying to intentionally assemble a Cabinet chock-full of people accused either of sexual assault or of enabling it, but if he were, he’d be killing it.

Former Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, who has been accused of “sexual encounters” with a minor and paying women for sex, withdrew his nomination for attorney general last month. Gaetz, who has denied the allegations, was in no way qualified for the position, but he met Trump’s main criterion of being likely to comply with the president-elect’s every decree. (In Gaetz’s stead, Trump has nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who faces claims of more pedestrian political corruption.)

[Read: Either way, Matt Gaetz wins]

Trump’s nominee to lead the Pentagon, the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth, has a military background, but he holds extreme views and beyond being another Trump toady is similarly unqualified to lead America’s large, complicated military bureaucracy. A 22-page police report describes an alleged sexual assault in California seven years ago—Hegseth has insisted that the encounter was consensual, and later entered into a financial settlement with the accuser; no charges were ultimately filed. Beyond the accusation, Hegseth’s statements about sexual assault and women reveal someone who appears to not take either rape or women’s contributions to the military seriously; he has, for example, suggested reversing the rule allowing women in combat roles, because they might be raped by their comrades. If Hegseth is innocent of the sexual-assault allegations, he would nevertheless remain unfit for the role.

Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a staunch ally of preventable childhood diseases who belongs nowhere near a public-health position in the federal government, given his views on vaccinations alone. He also stands accused of sexually assaulting his former live-in nanny. (As The Guardian reported, when asked about the incident publicly, Kennedy acknowledged having “skeletons in his closet,” and later sent the nanny a text saying he had no memory of the incident but apologizing for making her uncomfortable.)

Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to ruin the Department of Education, is being sued alongside her husband, the wrestling magnate Vince McMahon, over allegedly having enabled the sexual abuse of underage “ring boys” who worked for what was then known as the World Wrestling Federation, now World Wrestling Entertainment. (The McMahons have also denied any wrongdoing.) McMahon’s husband reportedly remains under federal investigation for sex trafficking related to their business, and she has no background in education, other than a brief stint on the Connecticut Board of Education that ended shortly before the revelation that she had falsely claimed to have an education degree.

Then there is Trump himself, who in a 2023 civil suit was held liable for sexually abusing the writer E. Jean Carroll. As Quinta Jurecic writes, “The choice to begin a new administration with this particular slate of picks represents a remarkable commitment to moral ugliness.” The message seems to be that allegations should be taken seriously only if they involve a certain class of persons.

These allegations are credible because they are backed up by official documents, witness accounts, and in Trump’s case, a verdict. That gives them more weight than a mere accusation. Notably, no standard of evidence would make these accusations credible to many conservatives, because the individuals are Republicans, whereas unfounded claims of sexual misconduct against entire categories of people have been a basis for right-wing policy making over the past four years.

[David A. Graham: Guilty on all counts]

Republicans spent much of the Biden years baselessly accusing LGBTQ people of being “groomers” seeking to sexually assault children, and then passing discriminatory laws using those same unfounded accusations as justification. They then nominated Trump, who had admitted on the infamous Access Hollywood tape that he believed his celebrity status allowed him to “grab” women “by the pussy,” and sent him back to the White House. Trump spent his campaign smearing immigrants as sexual predators as well. The contradiction here can be understood as a key element of Trump-era conservative ideology, which is that such categories as “sexual predator” can apply only to groups that conservatives are targeting, and never to conservatives themselves. An immigrant or LGBTQ person is therefore a “groomer” until proved otherwise, whereas a conservative by definition cannot be one, no matter what they’ve allegedly done.

For example, prior to Gaetz’s withdrawal, as reported by HuffPost’s Arthur Delaney, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham told a reporter, “We’re not going to try Pete Hegseth or Matt Gaetz based on press statements.” When the reporter pointed out that the allegations against Hegseth had been outlined in a police report, Graham responded, “I don’t care.”

Again, after several years of passing laws and demanding mass deportations on the pretext that sexual crimes are abhorrent and must be prevented without regard for the individual rights of entire groups of people, the response to such allegations made against a prominent Republican is “I don’t care.” Which at least has the virtue of being honest.

Contrast this indifferent response with the treatment of Representative-Elect Sarah McBride of Delaware, the first transgender person elected to federal office. House Speaker Mike Johnson and the publicity-hungry Representative Nancy Mace—who just four years ago attempted to present herself as someone who “strongly” supports “LGBT equality” when that seemed politically advantageous—have spent recent weeks publicly trying to humiliate and bully McBride. Johnson set a House rule banning her as well as any other trans-women staffers or visitors from women’s bathrooms on Capitol Hill, and Mace proposed a federal law that would do the same for “members, officers and employees” of the House. Mace has presented her bill as an attempt to protect women from sexual assault.

McBride, for her part, has said, “I’m not here to fight about bathrooms, I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. Like all members, I will follow the rules as outlined by Speaker Johnson, even if I disagree with them.” Nevertheless, it’s worth noting that such “bathroom bills” ultimately have the perverse effect of making any woman deemed insufficiently feminine subject to suspicion, as well as forcing men to use the women’s room.

As the writer Parker Molloy notes, the Republican fixation on McBride illustrates the folly of the punditocracy’s constant advice to Democrats to lay off “identity politics,” beyond the obvious fact that Trumpism is itself identity politics. Republicans get a say in which issues become salient, and if they want to make every news cycle about trans people or immigrants or whichever group they want to demonize, then they can do that. If Democrats then defend the rights of that group, prominent voices in the media will inevitably accuse the Democrats of being obsessed with identity politics, as though it was their choice to bring up the issue in the first place.

The contrast between how Republicans react to conservatives actually accused of sexual assault and a trans person who simply exists is instructive. If you are a conservative, then you cannot be a sexual predator no matter what you have done. If you are a member of a community that conservatives despise and wish to justify discrimination against, then you are a sexual predator, even if you have never preyed on anyone. This is not principled opposition to sexual abuse; it is a commitment to disparaging entire groups of people in order to legitimize intolerance against them. These divergent reactions offer a grim shorthand for Trumpist politics, which seeks not to solve problems but provide scapegoats for those problems, and then hope that people are too distracted by hatred to notice.